Personal video recording devices (PVRs) are becoming more commonplace in society. Like Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs), PVRs store video signals for later retrieval and reproduction, thereby allowing users to record a program that is broadcast at one time and view it at another time (time shifting). However, PVRs differ from VCRs in many ways.
One major difference is that, whereas VCRs store video signals on inexpensive magnetic tapes, PVRs store encoded video signals on a magnetic hard disk or hard drive. When a user wishes to watch a previously stored video program, the encoded data is retrieved from the hard drive, decoded, and then rendered on a television (TV) or monitor.
One set of problems with current PVRs revolve around storing the data on the hard drive. Unlike VCRs, where inexpensive tapes used to store the programs are easily removable, the hard drive is, to the typical user, permanently fixed within the PVR. The hard drive has a finite storage capacity, and therefore so too does the PVR. Once the hard drive is filled with data, no additional data can be stored until some of the data on the drive is deleted. Present PVRs lack any mechanism to easily transmit the data outside of the system, such as to a tape or removable disk. Therefore, data deleted from the hard drive is permanently lost, unless the data is re-captured from a different broadcast and again stored on the hard drive.
As PVRs evolve, users would like to see additional capability and functionality in their systems. For instance, a PVR that included multiple input data channels could record multiple channels of programming at the same time. Additionally, quality of the reproduced video could be enhanced if more data could be stored on the hard drive. There are ever increasing demands for storing more data at a faster rate with higher quality on a PVR.
Presently, data throughput of the hard drive is one of the system parameters that is most strongly considered when designing a PVR. The hard drive of the PVR has a finite input/output (throughput) bandwidth. If the throughput bandwidth could be raised, the amount of data simultaneously stored on the hard drive could be increased, and the quality of the compressed image data stored on the hard drive could be improved. Unfortunately, the throughput capacity of hard drives is fixed by hardware constraints of the drives themselves, and cannot be easily modified above their current maximum.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other deficiencies.